The dirt street was al-Hallaj’s drum,
he thumped it with his feet, refusing to succumb.

“Look, he’s dancing in his chains,”
local moralists complained.

Later, tortured with blades, head soon to be cut off,
he listened to his critics scoff

as his mind dissolved into the sky
which floated, blue with clouds, in Allah’s eye.

Now, each time Allah’s love for us makes Him grieve,
al-Hallaj looks down and weeps for the naïve

who think the discipline required for salvation
is obedience to rules, not insane imagination.

A disciple prays in al-Hallaj’s shadow
By Robert Bohm

Like a science without an underlying logic,
al-Hallaj hung from the gallows,
hands and feet cut off, establishing how intrinsic
blood and gore are to the soul.

I crawled onto the wooden platform
beneath where his body, a sack of garbage, swung.
This was the end of things. Desert stones were darkened
by the shadow of a buzzard’s flapping wings.

Yet in spite of the ugliness, I crawled
on hands and knees across the platform, slurping
the grisly stew al-Hallaj had blessed me with.
“This is how to live!” I thought.

In the morning when they lopped off his head,
then flung his limbless torso in the fire,
I swirled in circles
and chanted syllables only Allah admired.

Now, nourished by al-Hallaj’s bones and sinews,
and with a mind so broken the unknown enters it,
his words echo in my head like the wind pounding
the rocky crags atop Cheekha Dar mountain:

“Fools wedded to themselves begat tax collectors.
Nomads in the desert, we leave behind no wells.
Like a coin dropped in a sandstorm, the past is lost.
Blind as she-camels, we roam without locating home.”

A blasphemer in love with what he hates
and spattered with al-Hallaj’s blood and urine,
I pray in the gallows’ shadow
to whatever Allah creates or ruins —

I want to be your voice,
I want to be the sound of thunder,
I want to be the hypocrite’s despair,
I want to teach the killed to subdue their murderers.

A pile of filth, I curl up in a corner of my house.
Both hope and hopelessness have lost appeal.
With a nod to God, I crawl away toward nothing.
Laughing, God decrees, “Finally, your salvation’s guaranteed!”